Reproductions of Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha have numbed us to the revolutionary impact of posters in the last quarter of the 19th century.

As well as a potent advertising medium, the lithographed poster was a newly democratic art for newly empowered middle classes. The best even drew admiring notices from art critics and became collectors’ items. They also tracked trends in “high” art and design and, in a way, anticipated the look-at-me art to come in the 20th century.

Opening Sunday at the Dallas Museum of Art, “Posters of Paris: Toulouse-Lautrec and His Contemporaries” is a rich survey of the medium from the 1870s to the first decade of the 20th century. Curated by Mary Weaver Chapin, originally for the Milwaukee Art Museum, the show is elegantly displayed here, subtly spotlighted on mostly dark backgrounds — gray, blue, brown — with a surprising blush of pink at the start.

Invented at the end of the 18th century, lithography involved drawing designs on stones with oily substances that would repel water but attract ink, then inking the stone and pressing paper onto it. Each added color required another stone and great care in keeping everything in register. Displays at the end of the DMA show elucidate the process.

This tended to encourage a simplification and flattening of color, but as time went by, artists and printers became quite sophisticated in modulating tone and shadow. Printing was greatly speeded later in the 19th century by steam-driven presses.

Baron Haussmann’s remaking of Paris, leveling blocks of older buildings for wide new boulevards, and the proliferation of cylindrical advertising kiosks provided new outlets for the flowering of posters in the 1870s. This was also an age of new middle-class consumerism and an explosion of bohemian entertainments in places like the famous Moulin Rouge.

Amid big-city bustle, a bold, multicolored poster was ideal for attracting attention to a new product or entertainer. Toward the end of the DMA show, a giant blowup of a black-and-white Eugène Atget photo shows a Parisian wall plastered with rows of posters.

A pioneer in designing and printing posters, the long-lived Jules Chéret (1835-1933) figures often. The language of his designs ranges from almost baroque turbulence to mannerist exaggerations of limbs to very painterly jabs of color, but sheer energy is a constant. You can’t not look, which was precisely the point.

Lautrec’s almost cartoonish patches of flat color reflect the influence of Japanese woodblock prints, increasingly disseminated from the 1860s. His posters for the honky-tonks of his day highlighted the edgy, the sexy and the grotesque.

In his famous Moulin Rouge — La Goulue, the cancan dancer tilts away, kicking up her petticoats, while her silhouetted, long-chinned partner, “Valentin the Boneless,” leans awkwardly back, as if avoiding a flying boot.

The Moravian-born Mucha represents the full flowering of art nouveau, even hair rendered in elaborately curvaceous geometries. Quasi-mosaic patterns also evoke the medieval revivalism of John Ruskin and William Morris. A more crisply geometric art nouveau surfaces in Manuel Orazi’s poster for a home-decor store.

As much as impressionism, poster art was a rebellion against proprieties, moral as well as artistic. Then, as now, sex sold, and by the 1890s products as various as gasoline, kerosene lamps and bicycles were being advertised with barely draped female nudes, the flesh now sensuously nuanced. Artists were occasionally required to go back and cover up bare bosoms.

At the end of the exhibition, posters by Leonetto Cappiello project us into the 20th century. With bold colors on black backgrounds, a woman on a red horse advertises Swiss chocolates and a green devil clutches a bottle of cherry-flavored aperitif. Geico’s gecko can’t be far behind.

Plan your life

Through Jan. 20 at the Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 N. Harwood, Dallas. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays through Sundays; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays; 11 a.m. to midnight third Friday of each month. $14 includes general and special-exhibition admission. 214-922-1200. dallasmuseumofart.com

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About Scott Cantrell

Also writing occasionally about art and architecture, Scott came to The News in 1999, after 10 years at the Kansas City Star and previous positions at newspapers in Albany and Rochester, N.Y. A former president of the Music Critics Association of North America and two-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor award for music journalism, he has also written for The New York Times, Encyclopaedia Britannica, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and magazines including Gramophone, BBC Music, Opera, Opera News and Symphony Magazine. He has performed as an organist and choral conductor and taught music history at the State University of New York at Albany. He enjoys eating all too much, his tastes ranging from barbecue, collard greens and fried okra to French cuisine and fiery Indian food.